Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday November 15, 2012 @09:29AM
from the your-book-scanner-sucks dept.

c0lo writes "Engineers from Google's Books team have released the design plans for a comparatively reasonably priced (about $1500) book scanner on Google Code. Built using a scanner, a vacuum cleaner and various other components, the Linear Book Scanner was developed by engineers during the '20 percent time' that Google allocates for personal projects. The license is highly permissive, thus it's possible the design and building costs can be improved. Any takers?"
Adds reader leighklotz: "The Google Tech Talk Video starts with Jeff Breidenbach of the Google Books team, and moves on to Dany Qumsiyeh showing how simple his design is to build. Could it be that the Google Books team has had enough of destroying the library in order to save it? Or maybe the just want to up-stage the Internet Archive's Scanning Robot. Disclaimer: I worked with Jeff when we were at Xerox (where he did this awesome hack), but this is more awesome because it saves books."

I work in the tech recycling business, but we get literally hundreds of tons of books turned in for recycling. It pains me to see most of them go to paper recycling recovery, though there is a growing market for shops that scan barcodes for resale. I would think that Google would have problems with copyright law, as would any single entity who is at risk of scanning the wrong book (i.e. the one someone would take time to sue you for, especially if you have deep google-pockets). This direction opens to small scale "wiki-scanning", which could be really ideal since people who have actually read the book would probably be the best ones to figure out if was worth the time to scan, would tend to prioritize important books (preserving them) and would present a very decentralized system for lawsuits. If I can scan the book for "personal use" like the cassette tape rulings for music, all the better. The problem is the physical space these books take, and its causing a lot of out of print books to get made into cereal boxboard, and the scale at which 50-100 year old out of print books are getting recycled is scary.